


Peace Descending

by mythomagicallydelicious



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (but it's merle and he comes back bc of stolen century you know), Ascendant - Freeform, Can be read as gen, Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Light Angst, M/M, i'm tagging both bc it's just. it's easier. read it as either., implied/referenced canon character death, it's not shippy--it's just that i wrote this with the intention that john and merle love each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 11:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16832134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythomagicallydelicious/pseuds/mythomagicallydelicious
Summary: "You call us 'The Hunger.' That's not entirely inaccurate because we are hungry. But it would be more accurate to simply call us dissatisfaction. But soon, you will call us Ascendant."-John | The Hunger, Episode 63, The Stolen Century Part 4





	Peace Descending

Time was interminable within Ascendant. It was harmonious as all within focuses upon their goal. To consume the Light of Creation, to use its secrets to learn more, to be more, to grow closer to finally understanding **_purpose_** and **_existence_**. It is form within form within form, shapeless yet cohesive. It is every single atom driven together, hungering for the information it sought after.

The eyes that scout plane to plane open, blink, and begin the process of shifting from one dimension’s existence to another. It is long as it restarts its journey.

Every plane it welcomes to its folds took time to consume. Any casualty of Ascendant by the foolish members of any particular dimension that fights and rebels against their presence is minor. It isn’t mourned, though. Every step made is one closer to discovering the truth of existence. To step out of the confines of **_Fate,_** and bring more to their number. To consume their knowledge and understanding and accept the risks that came with it.

Ascendant continued on, moving slowly between planes, for an amount of time.

Ascendant was both aware and not, to an extent.

It has no face, yet millions of eyes.

It has no ears, yet hears everything.

It mutes color and life and cut the **_bonds_** between planes to mull over their significance before adding them to their number.

And, despite having no actual mouth, when one world trains one foreign dwarf in how to evoke **_peace_** , Ascendant can provide a mouthpiece.

He blinks into existence with much fumbling. His mind races and his entire body tingles, as if having been numb for a long time but now blood tried racing through, waking him up.

He is facing a view of a sky just before sunset. The sun hanging on the horizon in strange orange light. It reminded him of an angry orange sun he’d once seen daily. How it sat low in the sky and staring balefully at him. Tauntingly. The sun had purpose. But he’d sneered at it. The sun was trapped by **_Fate._** He was not. He was—he is— _wait_. _This isn’t right._

He turns and is startled by the presence of a dwarf, shirtless, waving at him. A smile he couldn’t trust and an inscrutable look in his eyes.

He ends the moment of exterior awareness in black fire, welcoming the feeling of belonging that Ascendant enfolded him in. The fire consumes him as well, until his vision turns dark and his body loses its shape and he rejoins his search with Ascendant, as he should be.

-

When he returns to that room, he feels the transition to physical form just as jarringly. The dwarf is back, and surprise ticks through him again.

Again, that meeting ends in fire, but this time with agreement as well.

-

He begins to differentiate the moments within Ascendant. The mouthpiece can tell time in the familiar way he is ripped from the darkness, reformed in that pale room with that orange sun always hanging low, but never going down. Always with that same dwarf, always with a smile.

He begins to remember what time means, other than the time it takes to move between planar systems. Besides looking through a million eyes, once as a scout, and once as a consumer, twice a year.

He spends time and time again, facing down a smiling dwarf with open hands and he really should have put a shirt on, by now.

The mouthpiece speaks and shares little but reveals so much more by his silences. His speeches are grand and empty.

He feels the surging power beneath his skin as he calls black fire to his hands, time and time again, to end his meetings with the smiling dwarf.

Time has become something concrete, again. Not constant, not clockwork, but knowable. There is a schedule and a procedure to being called into form again. To speak for the entity he drove to existence. To being the mouthpiece of a silent storm. To giving voice to a hundred billion beings striving for **_Ascendance._**

And in that final meeting, the meeting he did not know would be final, he is left more than incomplete. For the first time in a century of searching, he feels something other than **_hunger_** chip away at him as he destroys the smiling dwarf who has lost his smile. ~~As his~~ **_~~friend~~_** As the frowning dwarf is burning, flipping him a sign that is considered rude to many planes, the knowledge swirling around in his brain, feeling himself being pulled back into the folds of Ascendant.

He does not know that is the last of his **_~~friend~~_** dwarf he will see. It takes years for him to realize his smiling dwarf has not called him back. That he has not had a true form in years. That he is once again consumed by the **_purpose_** of searching for **_purpose_** , of escaping the strings of **_Fate_**.

He feels something he did not know he could feel, surrounded by every atom of every being of his home plane, multiplied by a hundred planes or more consumed in the interminable meantime. He feels **_lonely_**.

It is almost treacherous, that thought. He feels **_lonely_** and **_alone_** and he remembers back to a time when he was still forming Ascendant, when he was driven and purposeful and angry but he wasn’t **_alone_** in those feelings.

But now. He misses feeling time. He misses the ugly orange sun. He misses the ability to be a mouthpiece, even if he’s not sure there was anything left to say.

He misses his smiling dwarf.

And as time goes on, as Ascendant is left starving when the **_Light of Creation_** is nowhere to be found, as the spaceship with ~~his smiling dwarf~~ the crew eluding Ascendant and stealing their **_purpose_** from them, Ascendant grows darker.

It grows wild, and tumultuous. He can feel the **_dissatisfaction_** growing and turning unrecognizable.

Discord sweeps through Ascendant, and he cannot do a thing under the accusing eyes, the millions of eyes that watch him, that judge him, that pick out his form among the formless void and **_blame him_**.

And after more time, when Ascendant has been scouring existence, after time that he has felt acutely in the way Ascendant’s form has shuddered and shivered with rabid hunger, with starvation making it desperate, finally the eyes **_see_**.

He hopes for one moment, an indefinable moment, that his smiling dwarf will call him, will bring him back to that ugly room. To warn him, to talk to him. To say goodbye, this time. ~~To talk to his only friend.~~

Instead, time seems to be coming in stilted movements. The final descent happens in a blink and it happens in a century. His form has been lacerated by a million threads of darkness, cracking his skin and displaying neon reds, blues, greens, and yellows. He is no longer the mouthpiece, but he is far too aware to be destroyed and rejoined and reabsorbed completely.

So in desperation, he calls his smiling dwarf to him, instead. He opens **_parlay_** in that same room. He smiles, waving, strained and cracking apart at the seams. But Ascendant could not stop him from calling.

Ascendant does keep watch, however. He sits down, gesturing to a game they don’t have **_time_** to play, and lets the dwarf go first. His dwarf is smiling but it is different. His dwarf is smiling but it is tired and different and there’s something like **_regrets_** inside of the smile that he feels pierce his heart. That something has happened in the time they’ve had apart and he can’t see _his_ smile again.

He does all he can, and then he does more, and then he is blinded by pain, by a million eyes boring into him, flashing those neon brights at him. His skin is cracking as they ripple across his body, as the **_Hunger_** pulls him back without fire, this time, without his consent.

He is desperate and afraid and grasping for anything, and that is when he feels the first distinct touch he can remember in… ever.

His dwarf is smiling, is reassuring, is desperate and pulling him back, hugging arms around his body, tugging and talking and trying and it is the first and only **_bond_** he has ever felt. What he had in Ascendant was a mockery, a reversal to what a **_bond_** should be. This feeling, of arms outstretched and desperation fueled by- by-

 ** _Love_** , he thinks, as he is ripped from his dwarf’s arms, screaming and terrified and still trying to warn his dwarf of how to defeat Ascendant. Of how to kill him a thousand more times and let all that he has worked for crumble away into dust.

There was never going to be **_purpose_** for a form devoid of **_bonds_**. He can see that now. The strings of **_Fate_** were holding them in place, steadfast, despite their attempts at escape. At transcending life and death and gods and magic and friends and planes and bonds.

It was **_pointless_**.

He feels the pain acutely as neon colors rip through him, as the mockery of what Ascendant calls bonds is destroyed by their true counterpart.

He screams, and he is released and he does not know what time or love or friend or death or bond or life is.

And then he does.

He is standing on a beach, the orange sun sinking lower, disappearing to the horizon. Time is passing. Slow, but quick. Much too quick. He takes off his suit jacket, lays it on the sand. He doesn’t know why, he does not remember what to do at a beach.

So he sits, pulls off his shoes and socks, thinking about nothing in particular but how nice it would be to **_feel_** the world around him. He leans back on his hands and watches the sun sink lower, sink slower.

And then he senses a presence beside him. He does not tear his eyes from the scene before him, but he knows who it is. He pats the ground next to him and he says a few words and he hears **_love_** in his friend’s voice as he replies, sitting next to him.

There are no more words. Hundreds of questions, unspoken on the lips of the mouthpiece. He leans against his dwarf, not quite a smile on his face, as the sun slips farther away, as the tide rolls back into the ocean.

He feels his dwarf turn, tear his eyes from a sunset he has probably seen thousands of, will get to see thousands more of, and look at him. He feels the smile his dwarf is giving him as he presses a kiss to his cheek.

He smiles in return, one hand finding his dwarf’s hand, squeezing in a hundred conversations they will never have, a hundred emotions flitting through his soul before he disappears with the last of the light over the horizon.

And there is no more time. And there is no more purpose. And there is no more desperation.

There is, however, peace.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in my WIPs for forever!! I was going to actually name John at one point, but by the time (read: three months later) I finally came back, I liked it better when I didn't give him a fully separate identity from the Hunger. Anyway, thanks for reading!!


End file.
